“In Je veux voir we worked on the idea that the 2006 war represents a schism. At the time we were outside the country. We saw and lived this war out through images on television, blogs and the internet. These incredibly spectacular images ended up being, in a way, powerless. It was a very strange moment. We really felt this was a time of rupture in our history, not only in the history of our country, but also in our history as artists in the region. It’s like what Hannah Arendt said about the uncertain future, you know that there is no certainty in it.

We decided to deal with this by confronting someone from our history as Lebanese film-makers and artists, with someone outside of it, bringing together the artist and actor Rabih Mroué, with whom we have worked with a lot, and Catherine Deneuve, the French film icon. In this way we are attempting to experiment with new strategies for film-making in the aftermath of the 2006 war.

KJ: Traditionally when television shows victims of war, you can’t really identify with them because the images are designed to distance you. You sympathise but don’t identify. By bringing someone who is familiar in the Western history of cinema and someone from our world together, we wanted to see if through this encounter we could regain our face, our images, our identity, our names. And not play the role of the faraway victim, but create something that could engage the spectator. The idea was to displace the gaze and to question it. Paradoxically, the film is called I Want to See, but explores what you don’t see, or haven’t seen.

JH: The film works by constantly making you question what you’re seeing and what you’re not seeing. The film is about the way images are used in reporting conflict today and what this does to you, the spectator. Our big fear is always that, in the use of images, the use of art, the use of intellect, everything can be co-opted or instrumentalized, in order to make the individual into less of a thinking person, less of a subject, depoliticized, accepting reality in a lesser way.”

The resulting film is an absolute tour-de-force, one of those films that never leaves you once you’ve seen it. When one considers how much time is spent watching absolute junk, even entertaining mainstream junk, the shock and pleasure of a really evocative, thoughtful film comes as an absolutely pleasant surprise, a palate cleanser after so much trash and throwaway pop filmmaking, usually in the service of worn out genre and gender rules. Je Veux Voir instantly jumped into my top ten films of all time — in which there are more than 250 constantly rotating titles — but in all seriousness, this is a thrillingly intellectual film without one frame of wasted footage; at 69 minutes, it’s just perfect.

Alejandro Jodorowsky famously made the metaphorical “western” El Topo, but his output has been minimal over the years, perhaps because he tries to mount such elaborate projects. Here’s the trailer for a film about his version of the classic science-fiction novel Dune, which never got made for various reasons. As Tartaglione reports, “Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune debuted in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar in Cannes last year before being acquired by Sony Pictures Classics and playing the fall fest circuit. A trailer has dropped for the documentary about veteran Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s ill-fated attempt to bring Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi novel, Dune, to the screen.

In the mid-1970s, Jodorowsky (El Topo, Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre) came up with an ambitious take on the tome and spent two years in pre-production. The film was to star Jodorowsky’s own 12-year-old son Brontis alongside Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, David Carradine and Salvador Dali, set to a musical score by Pink Floyd with art design by H.R. Giger and Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud. But the project ultimately went unrealized and the rights lapsed.

David Lynch made his own version of Dune in 1984 with Kyle MacLachlan, Sting and Sean Young. Here’s a look at what might have been.” As you can see from the trailer, a lot of work went into the design of the film, and the casting was certainly ambitious. I’m sorry that this never saw the light of day, as I think it would have been a fascinating project — perhaps better than Lynch’s version, but we’ll never know.

As I wrote in my book Streaming: Movies, Media and Instant Access, Facebook has been from the beginning little more than a data mining operation, which simply tries to collect as much information on all of its subscribers as it possibly can, and then use this information for profit. And they keep upping the ante with every passing day.As Casey Johnston reported in Ars Technica on December 16, 2013, in addition to the material you actually post on Facebook, the site also wants to know about the stuff you type in, and then think better of, and decide not to post.

As Johnston writes, “Facebook released a study last week indicating that the company is moving into a new type of data collection in earnest: the things we do not say. For an analysis of self-censorship, two researchers at Facebook collected information on all of the statuses that five million users wrote out but did not post during the summer of 2012. Facebook is not shy about the information it collects on its users. Certain phrasings in its data use policy have indicated before that it may be collecting information about what doesn’t happen, like friend requests that are never accepted.

Capturing the failures of Facebook interactions would, in theory, allow the company to figure out how to mitigate them and turn them into ’successes.’ Adam Kramer, a data scientist at Facebook, and Sauvik Das, a summer Facebook intern, tracked two things for the study: the HTML form element where users enter original status updates or upload content and the comment box that allows them to add to the discussion of things other people have posted. Over the course of those 17 days, 71 percent of the users typed out a status, a comment, or both but did not submit it.

On average, they held back on 4.52 statuses and 3.2 comments. In addition to that information, Das and Kramer took note of the users’ demographic information, ‘behavioral features,’ and information on each user’s ’social graph’ like the average number of friends of friends or the user’s ‘political ideology’ in relation to their friends’ beliefs. They used this information to study three cross sections with self-censorship: how the user’s political stance differs from the audience, the user’s political stance and how homogenous the audience is, and the user’s gender related to the gender diversity of their network.”

Spies of Mississippi covers ground that’s been mined before, but Porter has done something new here, uncovering the amazing story of “the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission’s [MSSC] efforts to preserve segregation during the 1950s and ‘60s — when its network of informants spied on over 87,000 Americans — as it covered up violence and murder in order to preserve the status quo.” Clocking in at just an hour, Porter’s documentary is much more than a succession of talking heads; it’s a gripping, compact, and absolutely riveting mix of raw footage from the period, much of it never before seen, recently declassified documents from the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission showing just how rampant racism was in the state, and interviews with the people who lived through the period, and know better than anyone else the reality of the situation. In an interview you can read by clicking here, or on the image above, Porter opens up about the making of Spies of Mississippi. As she told Craig Phillips,

“before I heard this story I thought I knew a lot about the era. That’s what is so wonderful about history — if we look, there are more things to find. Many people know about the FBI’s efforts to undermine the civil rights leaders, but very few people knew of the network established by Mississippi state government. And that’s what really attracted me to this story; this is not a story of a few rogue racist individuals, it’s state government, using taxpayer dollars to deny rights to a group of people based on race. I think it’s a remarkable story about abuse of power and how secrecy is not always a friend to democracy.

I was surprised by so many things, but clearly one of the most shocking was the information about the black informants. The idea that African Americans would spy for white supremacists probably should not shock me, but it did. Second, I feel like this fills in a piece of the puzzle regarding the tragic deaths of the young civil rights workers [James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael 'Mickey' Schwerner]. They didn’t have an accidental run in with the racist police or the Klan, they were tracked using information from spies.

I was shocked to learn that the State of Mississippi, not just the FBI, used spies to try and intimidate and stop integration. When I learned that some of them were black I wanted to know what would motivate people. Digging into the story, it makes sense that there were complicated feelings in the African American community about the marchers and civil rights activity. There was a lot of fear.”

This is the kind of work we need much more of on television, and the sort of hard-edged and innovative reporting that only PBS seems to offer. In addition, it’s also superbly confident filmmaking, thrilling in its mastery of the medium, and the work of a master filmmaker.

“In the most advanced areas of this civilization, the social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual protest is affected at its roots. The intellectual and emotional refusal ‘to go along’ appears neurotic and impotent. This is the socio-psychological aspect of the political event that marks the contemporary period: the passing of the historical forces which, at the preceding stage of industrial society, seemed to represent the possibility of new forms of existence. But the term ‘introjection’ perhaps no longer describes the way in which the individual by himself reproduces and perpetuates the external controls exercised by his society. Introjection suggests a variety of relatively spontaneous processes by which a Self (Ego) transposes the ‘outer’ into the ‘inner.’ Thus introjection implies the existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to the external exigencies—an individual consciousness and an individual unconscious apart from public opinion and behavior.

The idea of ‘inner freedom’ here has its reality: it designates the private space in which man may become and remain ‘himself.’ Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory. The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions. The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with the society as a whole. This immediate, automatic identification (which may have been characteristic of primitive forms of association) reappears in high industrial civilization; its new ‘immediacy,’ however, is the product of a sophisticated, scientific management and organization.

In this process, the ‘inner’ dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking—the critical power of Reason—is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition. The impact of progress turns Reason into submission to the facts of life, and to the dynamic capability of producing more and bigger facts of the same sort of life. The efficiency of the system blunts the individuals’ recognition that it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power of the whole. If the individuals find themselves in the things which shape their life, they do so, not by giving, but by accepting the law of things—not the law of physics but the law of their society.”

That’s why I haven’t posted on this superbly talented actor since his tragic death. Like nearly everyone else who loves movies, I was always moved Hoffman’s work, especially in films where he really went out on a ledge, like Capote, for which he deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Actor. But his death throws his entire life’s work into sharp perspective; after 50 films in 25 years, there will never be another Philip Seymour Hoffman film. It’s a tragedy of immense proportions for his family, his colleagues, and for those of us who cherished and looked forward to his next piece of work.

The New York Post has just published a selection of some of Hoffman’s best interview quotes, and here he is talking about the vicissitudes of fame: “I do my best not to feed into any aspect of fame when it comes up. If I ever get a sense that if I say this or I do that, it could feed into that dynamic, I stay away from that. I think some people navigate the waters of being very well known very well, actually. But I actually just don’t even want to go there. And I think that has more to do with how I am as a person. I don’t like to be the center of attention; I really don’t think I’m that guy, and when I am, it’s for a reason. And I think part of it is that if you just keep attacking your day like you would no matter what, people start to get used to you.

So I might be walking by a lot of people during the day, they’re like, ‘Oh! That’s Phil Hoffman!’ But if they keep seeing me walk by them all the time, they’re like, ‘Oh, Phil Hoffman.’ It stops becoming important. So that’s why if I go to a different city, all of a sudden I’m reminded again. But in New York, or in Chicago, towns I’ve been in or mingled in enough, they see you and there you are, and hopefully you don’t run into the person from out of town. [Laughs.] Who doesn’t know you like that, and is just completely overwhelmed that they’re seeing you.”

This really says it all; here’s a theater that’s been running films for a century, but since movies are no longer shot on film, they have to make the digital switch or die. They probably could have moved faster on it, and taken part in the studios’ program to help theaters convert — but I bet that they just loved the look of film over digital projection, and never imagined the day would come when they simply couldn’t get 35mm prints anymore. The studios are actually destroying the 35mm prints of their older films; they don’t want them around as an option, even for archivists or collectors. It’s a DCP (Digital Cinema Package) world, and that’s all there is to it. There simply isn’t an option for 35mm projection anymore. Outside of a few museums and revival houses, and some university facilities, 35mm is gone, gone, gone.

As I note, “Let’s just start by saying that this is an excellent book. I get stacks of new titles every day from publishers, and it takes a lot for a book to really jump out of the pile and interest me, particularly on a topic that has been researched as thoroughly as the Hollywood Blacklist. But Rebecca Prime’s Hollywood Exiles in Europe: The Blacklist and Cold War Film Culture (2013) is exceptional, and part of an equally exceptional series of books from Rutgers University Press, “New Directions in International Studies,” ably edited by Patrice Petro.

The Hollywood Blacklist is always an important topic, but there’s been so much written about it that one would think that all possible avenues of inquiry have been pursued. But that’s not the case: Prime’s book is fresh, original, written in a direct and accessible manner, and adds a great deal of new material to the existing literature on the era. This is a book, in short, that demands one’s attention.

What distinguishes Prime’s book above all else is the sense of urgency she brings to her examination of the key figures affected by the blacklist; Joseph Losey, Ben Barzman, Jules Dassin, and other well known Hollywood figures who decided it was better to leave America, then in the grip of madness, rather than battle it out with the openly hostile ‘authority’ of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

This is a familiar tale, but what Prime makes clear in her study is just how difficult it was for these talent writers, directors and producers to survive in England, which wasn’t as welcoming as is generally assumed in hindsight. The FBI and the HUAC still shadowed these exiles, with the help of the British authorities, and so they were never really free of surveillance.”

About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon, Ryan Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is an internationally recognized scholar and writer of film history, theory and criticism. He is the author of thirty books and more than 100 articles on film, and appears regularly in national media outlets discussing film and culture trends. Frame by Frame is a collection of his thoughts on a number of those topics. All comments by Dixon on this blog are his own opinions.

In The National News

Wheeler Winston Dixon has been quoted by Fast Company, The New Yorker, The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, The Christian Science Monitor, US News and World Report, The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, The PBS Newshour, USA Today and other national media outlets on digital cinema, film and related topics - see the UNL newsroom at http://news.unl.edu/news-releases/1/ for more details.

UNL Film Studies Professor Wheeler Winston Dixon discusses the 2015 Ridley Scott film "The Martian," and the accuracy (and often inaccuracy) of science-fiction films at predicting real advancements in science and technology. […]